Skip to main content

Bottom and Titania in a Multiplex


Bottom had walked into the multiplex for window-shopping.  The centralised air-conditioning in the multiplex was a joyful relief from the scorching heat in the city’s overcrowded open spaces.  Moreover, he could gratify his voyeuristic inclination by looking at the legs or cleavages of the pretty fairies that wafted coquettishly around with mobile phones clinging to their ears like earrings and chocobars slipping through their velveteen lips.

Though he imagined the girls as fairies Bottom didn’t really believe that fairies existed.  So when he was approached by Titania, the fairy queen herself, his surprise was quite palpable.  But, like most twenty-first century boys (and girls, of course), he knew how to tackle any odd situation in life and so he overcame his surprise sooner than any person from another period of human history would.
Titania had just woken up from a sleep.  But her mind was still under the influence of the overdose of the sex pill she had had earlier.  The first man she saw as she woke up was Bottom. Yes, she was sleeping in the multiplex.  Fairies can sleep anywhere. In the olden times they used to sleep in the cool shade of trees in some jungle.  When jungles started disappearing fairies faced the threat of extinction like the Indian tigers.  However, unlike the Indian tigers, the fairies discovered appropriate places for survival – the air-conditioned multiplex, for instance. So there she was, Titania, with all her attendant bevy of fairy maids.  She saw Bottom sitting absolutely relaxed on one of the chairs on the third floor of the multiplex, watching the girls on the ever-flowing escalators, with his legs stretched out as far as they would go.
“You look fabulously handsome, young man.  I’m bowled over.”
Bottom looked at the beautiful but odd and tiny creature standing before him, then at the other creatures who accompanied her, and again at the speaker. By the time his gaze travelled so much he had overcome his surprise. 
“Yeah, no wonder you’re bowled over.  I had a lot of girlfriends at school, you know. You are also welcome.  One more won’t make much difference.”
“You are as wise as you are handsome.”
“Well, you know, I think I’ve seen you somewhere earlier.”
He must have seen her in his fairy tale books which he used to read long ago.
“Ask me whatever you wish and my maids will attend to your wishes instantly.”
Quite strange, thought Bottom.  But like most boys (and girls, of course) of his time he knew how to rise to the occasion.  “Okay, I want my parents to stop peering into my room to check what I’m doing with my laptop.”
“Do you really want that, dear?” asked Titania, though she was under the spell of the sex pill.
“You said you could get me anything. Get me this and prove yourself.”
“But...” hesitated Titania. She was not as quick as the new generation lover of hers.
“Alright, darling.  I’m paralysing your parents.  They won’t ever walk anymore.”  Fairies belonged to an ancient period.  For them curse and blessing were all a once and for all thing.  They were not aware of multitasking or part-time jobs, for example. Eternity does not understand calendars.
“Where are you going so soon, darling? Sit with me, play with me, dance with me…” pleaded Titania under the influence of the sex pill and also the ignorance about human nature. 
“You think I’m nuts? Bye, see you, ta ta... I just want to make sure that they are indeed paralysed.”
The shock of base ingratitude was too much even for the hangover of the sex pills.  When the hangover took an unexpectedly earlier leave of her, Titania realised what a fool she had been making of herself.
“This is the problem of deforestation,” she mumbled to herself as she went in search of Oberon who might be flirting with some dunce with hair dyed in brilliant colours in another part of the multiplex.

[This is a spoof on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene i. Titania is the fairy queen in the play and Oberon is the king.  Bottom is a working class member of Shakespeare’s contemporary London society.]




Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers




Comments

  1. [ Smiles ] Well, it was certainly an enjoyable read.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gosh Sir! An intellectual spoof indeed. Very real and believable.
    Imagine Bottom not protesting & rather going to check if his parents are really paralyzed...
    Forests replaced with Concrete Jungles. And innocent fairies now under the effect of harmful pills...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Anita, for your patience to understand my stories.

      Delete
  3. An interesting spoof! Really funny!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

War and Meaning of Victory

In the summer of 1999, while the rest of India was soaked in monsoon and Cricket World Cup, the country’s soldiers were clawing up frozen cliffs daring the bullets that came shooting from above. India’s incorrigible neighbour had sent its soldiers and militants to capture the snow-covered peaks of Kargil. It was an act of deception, a capture of India’s land stealthily. The terrain was harsh and hostile, testing the limits of human courage with every jagged step. The Kargil War was not just against a human enemy, but against peaks of stones and snow where the air itself was an adversary. Three months of bitter conflict and subhuman killing ended in India’s victory over the invading Pakistan. Victory! July 26 is celebrated ever after as Kargil Vijay Diwas by India. What is victory, however? Philosophically, I mean. We are supposed to be rational (philosophical) creatures, after all. “ W ar does not determine who is right,” Bertrand Russell said famously, “but who is left.” Every...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...